Looking back on my deliberation and further evaluation, I have found the results very successful. Since our topic was relatable to the audience considering their age group and they are students themselves there was nonstop discussion throughout the entirety of the presentation. All the audience members spoke more than once and were actively engaged in our deliberation and said some much-needed external opinions, viewpoints, and feedback. We were glad to see everyone taking an interest in our topic and find our approaches to the issue of student debt to be helpful and riveting. I think what went well was how we facilitated our deliberation and gave everyone a chance and enough time to share their thoughts on each approach and the overview. Based on our criteria the audience members were able to give us reasonable arguments or agreements with how our approaches to the problem would or not be feasible. Another way our deliberation went well was the questionnaire at the end and how it was almost unanimous for our audience to agree on one approach. On the other hand, there were some things we could improve on–one of our approaches excluded a good portion of our targeted population, so next time we should make sure all our approaches can be generalized and applied to everyone. Another thing that could have been improved upon was ourselves as facilitators to ask more questions and sort of guide the discussion better and not go too far off track. But, overall I believe our deliberation was quite a success!

Work Cited:

Backstorm, Brian. “Relieving the Burden of Student Loan Debt.” Rockefeller Institute of Government, 20 May 2022, https://rockinst.org/blog/relieving-the-burden-of-student-loan-debt/.